- Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) The HADS (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983) was chosen as a measure of self-reported depression and anxiety. As compared to the Beck Depression Inventory and State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the HADS is a 14 item questionnaire and does not tend to overburden or exhaust patients regarding filling out measures. The HADS is a more discrete measure that controls for complaints better explained by the somatic problem than does the BDI or STAI (Hermann, 1997).